Humanity has now officially broken the 1,000 frames-per-second barrier thanks to a pair of Polish overclockers and Doom Eternal.
Bethesda's id Tech 7 engine was built for speed. Doom and Doom Eternal certainly look good, but part of the games' magic is just how smoothly the animations look, from imps tossing fireballs to the Doom Slayer crushing their heads. High frames are a necessary ingredient for Doom Eternal's symphony of violence, and the id Tech 7 is an ideal conductor.
Lead engine programmer Billy Khan theorized that the Tech 7 engine could punch above 1,000 fps if it were mated to the right hardware. Five months later, and that hardware has been developed by a pair of Polish overlockers.
Bethesda reached out to Polish PC hardware site X-kom shortly after Doom Eternal's launch to make a special project for QuakeCon at Home. They apparently didn't get it done quite in time for Bethesda's online convention, but they did get it done.
The goal: get Doom Eternal over 1,000 fps. To do that, X-kom R&D head Marcin “Ryba” Rywak partnered with tech blogger Piotr “Lipton” Szymanski to make a custom super rig for the express purpose of getting Doom Eternal to run at ludicrous speeds.
That rig's hardware included an Intel i7 9700K processor overclocked so each of its eight cores ran at 6.6 GHz, an ASUS RTX 2080Ti video card, HyperX Predator RAM, an M2 Samsung SSD, and BeQuiet’s 1200W Straight Power PSU.
Upon booting up for the first time, Rywak and Szymanski were able to get between 500 and 600 fps--an excellent number for any normal PC gaming enthusiast. But to get to 1,000 fps, they needed something extra: liquid nitrogen.
They made a custom cooling rig where liquid nitrogen was poured directly onto the CPU to freeze it. This froze the processor down to temperatures cool enough to run at optimal efficiency, and that eventually allowed Doom Eternal to run at 1,000 fps at 1280x720 resolution.
What? You weren’t expecting 1,000 frames at 4K, were you? Maybe after NVIDIA releases their new graphics cards.
Source: Bethesda